EVENTS

Imagine if the feminists had gotten their claws into Columbus!

Well this is classic.

Ha! Where to begin? How about with what happened to the people who lived on the continent that Columbus “discovered”? How about the cluelessness of using Columbus for a fantasy of genius scientific genius strangled by political correctness? How about the blithe assumption that there couldn’t have been anything to say to Columbus other than “We are struck dumb by your masculine awesomeness”?

Hmm, unsurprisingly, the Block Bot kept his bile off my TL automatically. Nine times out of ten when someone RT’s or posts something awful from someone on twitter, I find that they are already in the Bot. Thanks again, @oolon.

In the end, @mggtTaylor and @RichardDawkins have advanced the frontiers of science. You’ve written a blog shitting on people.

This suggests how far science as a means of serving the needs and potential of humans and other living beings has digressed toward science as abstract Transcendence, Advancement, and so on. Ridiculous and pathetic.

Well yes, because everybody is totally uninterested in the mission. Landing on a comet? Oh, well I was teeth-shatteringly excited about it but, well, you know, I saw a guy in a tasteless shirt and now I don’t care about that. Oh, wait, no. I’m capable of having multiple thoughts in my head.

I’ve got to wonder, are their minds so limited that they can only manage one thought at a time, and so they assume that the same is true of us, or do they merely think that we’re simply less intellectually capable because we’ve been infected by feminism?

Richard Dawkins never did anything remotely as awesome as landing a spacecraft on a comet. He is first and foremost a science educator and a commenter.

His actual scientific research is pretty darn scant. Pecking preference in domestic chicks and some such. He was a prolific letter writer and essayist. Actual, real, advance-the-ball science? Not so much.

And actually landing a spacecraft on a comet — cool as shit, but let’s get real. They didn’t advance science. They used the available technology to do something incredibly difficult. It was a technological achievement, not a scientific one. The science coming out of the mission will be the analysis of the results that the spacecraft sent back. Not the landing itself.

It’s like claiming Marie Curie’s contributions to science were the beakers she used to process and purify radium. The spacecraft was the tool used to do science — not the science itself.

Well, we can say one thing for Matt Taylor: when he participated in the historic landing on a rock, it wasn’t by throwing out centuries of established science, and so far it hasn’t resulted in wholesale genocide. So he’s definitely ahead of Columbus in those regards.

It’s so cute that he thinks Columbus would dare dress like that for a royal audience. I’m willing to bet that, with all his really horrifying and nasty flaws, Columbus still had a fair idea of how to dress appropriately for an important public event.

No matter which thread you pull here, you can’t untangle the weird thought process.

#14 psanity says: You beat me too it. Although it might be a little besides the point, if Columbus had appeared before the royal couple dressed like that, they’d have thanked him curtly, told him they’d take it from there, and booted him out.

If Columbus had appeared before the court dressed in anything other that clothing approved for appearing before the court, he would have been arrested and interrogated by the Inquisition. Because it would be pretty clear to everyone in the room that he was demon-possessed.

You don’t need any science at all to know that the restrictions on dress, accessories, details, grooming, behaviour and speech for someone appearing at that court at that time would put any modern group, feminist or otherwise, to shame.

(Apart from any other aspect of Columbus reporting in as being relevant to science.)

One thing I find a bit puzzling is that I haven’t actually seen any conservative outcry over the shirt. You would think there would have been some, as after all it surely does not meet “family values” standards either.

I have worked at CERN and DESY. So I am pretty used to the politics of multinational collaborations with thousands of researchers.

If the head of our experiment had worn that shirt they would have been fired. Because the very last thing a public spokesperson can do is embarrass their sponsors. If you are spending over a billion dollars of public money you have to make sure that the politicians are happy. And doing anything that would embarrass them is utterly beyond acceptable.

Its not like he was personally responsible for the mission which launched 12 years ago meaning that the engineering effort was 20-12 years ago. This guy wasn’t in grad school at the start of the project. It isn’t his to mess up.

As for Columbus, wouldn’t it have been rather better if the King of Spain had given a thought for the tens of thousands of natives Columbus enslaved and/or killed? His crimes were more than a sexist shirt.

Columbus was far nastier than most people realize he was, and most people realize he was pretty nasty. Sexist? I dunno – enslaving the local women for sexual purposes? If not for the prudery de temps, he probably would have liked that shirt, and might have had one of the island women make one for him; I’m sure she’d have done it voluntarily – or had her hand cut off and hung around her neck pour encourager les autres. People shouldn’t talk about Columbus without first throwing up in their mouth a little bit, like I just did.

@20 Phillip: If the head of our experiment had worn that shirt they would have been fired. Because the very last thing a public spokesperson can do is embarrass their sponsors. If you are spending over a billion dollars of public money you have to make sure that the politicians are happy. And doing anything that would embarrass them is utterly beyond acceptable.

Yep – that’s all that needs to be said. Shouldn’t it be??

And as for the King of Spain, well, that’s rather water under the bridge by this point, isn’t it? 500+ years on?? Okay, the King of Spain is forever condemned as a monster. Are we good with this now? Can we recover to the point that we can even *consider* the nuances of public appearance and its repercussions???

A quick question. When E.O. Wilson said Richard Dawkins was a journalist. Dawkins replied that he invites anybody to read the Extended Phenotype to judge his scientific credentials. Science is a social discipline. You don’t do it by writing popular books by yourself, which are really useful for the public. You have to publish or perish, and be reviewed by peers. Roughly, you (and your team) get a hypothesis, beg for money, obtain your data, synthesize a report on that data (and maybe update your hypothesis in a bayesian type of way), then get judged by your peers and hopefully get cited a lot. Wash-rinse-repeat.

Isn’t the Extended Phenotype a science popularity book? I haven’t read much of the great one apart from the God Delusion and a bit of Anscestor’s Tale and Greatest show on Earth, so I don’t know, it could be a collation if his greatest scientific studies.

Just from the amazon reviews, it could be described as both a popular science book and philosophy of science; in that it explains evolution from a gene centred view. I don’t see how it is science, the discipline that scientists practice. Perhaps he word a lab coat whilst writing it? Television tells me that you’re not doing science without a lab coat.

Brian E: The Extended Phenotype looks to me like a quite densely argued work of theoretical biology – and its references include 9 peer-reviewed journal contributions by Dawkins. It’s possible to do good theoretical science without obtaining your own data. Look at Einstein for instance.

One thing I find a bit puzzling is that I haven’t actually seen any conservative outcry over the shirt. You would think there would have been some, as after all it surely does not meet “family values” standards either.

They probably saw who was complaining about it and decided they’d rather not sully themselves with aligning with the “wrong” group than take the satisfaction of complaining What About The Children.

It’s possible to do good theoretical science without obtaining your own data. Look at Einstein for instance.

It is indeed. I said my idea of science was a rough one. So, I will find that Dawkins’ book, which he himself holds as a guide of his scientific credentials, has been extensively cited and elaborated by other scientists in peer reviewed journals and studies? If not, then it’s hardly like Einsteins papers on special relativity and Brownian motion.

It is interesting that you use the ‘great man of science’ trope. The loner, working away in isolation, changs the world, when in reality, science is a collaborative effort. Neither Einstein, Dawkins, or Matt Taylor, men of science, did it alone.

Brian E above, I find the basis for your purported scepticism about Dawkins’ scientific credentials specious and (worse) irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I didn’t think we just accepted what Famous atheists said. If Dawkins points to artifact X, as being worthy for any reason, at the very least, we ought have a look. To not do so is to hold him as above scrutiny.

I thought it was germane. The topic is we can’t upset the great men of science because they do science stuff, and the feminazis are hurting these great science men’s fee-fees so they should shut up. So is that book doing science or not, or is he pointing to a well written popular book as a means of asserting his cred as part of the in group of great men of science?

what happened to the people who lived on this continent who were killed by the people that Columbus’s people killed? Did those women wear clothing appropriate to the tasks they performed or did they go around in the garb of some sqauw’s fantasy? And what happened to the megafauna who lived on this continent that were killed by the people who were killed by the people that Columbus’s people killed?

To the North American preeners who dump on Columbus and what came after; do you work to give back the continent to the Indigenous? If not, shut up and enjoy the place.

Ah, well, Columbus didn’t discover the new world, after all. The President of Turkey says it was the Muslims! You know how we know that they didn’t? They would have killed the men, enslaved the women, and everyone would now be Muslim. And there would certainly be no feminists in sight. This didn’t happen, so President Erdogan must be wrong.

People should choose examplars more carefully, Columbus wasn’t a rocket scientist in any sense of the term.
He didn’t return to Spain claiming that he’d discovered a new continent, he thought that he had reached East Asia. He had seriously underestimated the circumference of the Earth, the fact is that his idea was completely hare-brained and the ‘scientific genius’ and other members of his expedition were lucky that the Americas were in the way.
Columbus wasn’t even the first European to ‘discover’ America, the Vikings reached North America 500 years earlier.

They would have killed the men, enslaved the women, and everyone would now be Muslim. And there would certainly be no feminists in sight.

Except killing the men and enslaving the women is precisely what Columbus and his Catholic crew did. Some highlights:

According to the report, Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery. Testimony recorded in the report claims that Columbus congratulated his brother Bartolomé on “defending the family” when the latter ordered a woman paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue cut out for suggesting that Columbus was of lowly birth.

The document also describes how Columbus put down native unrest and revolt; he first ordered a brutal crackdown in which many natives were killed and then paraded their dismembered bodies through the streets in an attempt to discourage further rebellion.

In 1495, in a large slave raid, Columbus and his men rounded up 1,500 Awawak men, women, and children, and put them in pens. They selected what they considered the best natives and loaded them onto ships back to Spain. Two hundred died en route. After the survivors were sold as slaves in Spain, Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
[…]
But slaves weren’t enough for Columbus or the Spanish monarchy. Columbus needed to bring back gold. Columbus and his crew believed there were gold fields in the province of Cicao on Haiti. He and his men ordered all natives fourteen years or older to collect a certain amount of gold every three months. Natives who didn’t collect enough gold had their hands cut off.
[…]
Las Casas describes how Spaniards rode on the backs of natives. How the Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” Las Casas adds “two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”

Emphasis mine. It’s almost like brutality and tyranny weren’t invented by Islam. It’s almost like dictators come under every religious banner, and that reality is more complicated than “this religion is all bad forever.”

But I’m sure there’s a nuanced and totes reasonable philosophical reason to pretend that Muslim conquerors would have been worse than Christian ones, even as the former was leaving their golden age and the latter entering its Inquisition phase. I’m sure it’s just as valid as the reason to pretend that there are no Muslim feminists.

Probably there’s not much difference in the genocidal record of the followers of either religion.
I’m not sure what your reference to Islam’s ‘golden age’ implies, during that era Muslim aggression against Europe and Asia continued unabated.

I didn’t think we just accepted what Famous atheists said. If Dawkins points to artifact X, as being worthy for any reason, at the very least, we ought have a look. To not do so is to hold him as above scrutiny.

A flawed approach; determining the relevance of a claim to the assessment of a proposition should be a prior consideration to assessing the merit of the claim itself.

I thought it was germane. The topic is we can’t upset the great men of science because they do science stuff, and the feminazis are hurting these great science men’s fee-fees so they should shut up. So is that book doing science or not, or is he pointing to a well written popular book as a means of asserting his cred as part of the in group of great men of science?

I think it’s a bit more general than that, but fine.

Thing is, disputing the actual status of the proponent of a proposition about the status of certain people is a futile method for rebutting the proposition itself, being a fallacy of irrelevance.

Sorry if I’ve upset any sacred cows.

There are no sacred cows to upset, so your conditional is always false.

I’m not sure what your reference to Islam’s ‘golden age’ implies, during that era Muslim aggression against Europe and Asia continued unabated.

And vice versa, We apply these terms to periods of history that naturally obscure the nuance of the age. The Enlightenment coincided with the Atlantic slave trade, the Renaissance coincided with the Spanish Inquisition, and so forth. The implication was simply that the 15th century was when the Muslim world was exiting a period of relative freedom, secularism, and intellectualism, while the European world was entering a period of totalitarian theocracy. Pretending like Islam has some special eternal claim to barbarism is ahistorical and ignorant at best.

“We apply these terms to periods of history that naturally obscure the nuance of the age.”

I presume by using ‘nuance’ you are stating that “golden ages” have their dark side, which was my original assumption, I don’t disagree.

“…the Muslim world was exiting a period of relative freedom, secularism, and intellectualism, while the European world was entering a period of totalitarian theocracy.”

Generalisations. Europe’s period of “totalitarian theocracy” was never as prolonged or uniform as that statement implies and the Muslim world also exited its so-called ‘Golden Age’ long before the 15th century. Also “secularism” traditionally has no meaning in Islam, it’s completely incorrect to project such a Western concept onto Muslim societies, there’s no notion of “render unto Caesar”. In contrast to the West, Islamic ‘intellectualism’ had a very limited base, Muslim Arabs were even behind the Europeans in the widespread use of “Arabic” numerals and printing by movable type, even though the technology reached the Islamic world centuries before Europe.

“Pretending like Islam has some special eternal claim to barbarism is ahistorical and ignorant at best.”
Of course, I never suggested that Islam has some special (historical) claim to barbarism.
It’s not necessary to overstate the virtues of Islamic civilisation to support your argument.

Of course, I never suggested that Islam has some special (historical) claim to barbarism.

I didn’t say you did, though admittedly I was unclear on that point. But I also fail to see how citing two examples of technological development supports the idea that “Islamic ‘intellectualism’ had a very limited base.” If we cite, say, optics and medicine, we get a very different picture. I would venture to say that any broad statement on the nature of philosophy and learning in any large, well-populated region over any multi-century period of time is likely to be so generalized as to be largely useless.

Which was kind of my point. Especially in parts of the west, especially now, people have a tendency to talk about Muslims as a single unified group, and some seem to think that the current sociopolitical state of the Middle East extends back into antiquity, as though they were a homogenous culture preserved in amber since the Crusades or something, when in truth that state barely stretches back to the middle of the 20th century in many places, and certainly isn’t homogenous. Some people who are quite happy to distinguish between sects and degrees of fundamentalism and textual adherence in Christianity and Judaism will turn around and act like there is one Islam and Osama is its prophet. It’s a ludicrous and ignorant position, but all too common, including among leftists and atheists.